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NancyLebovitz comments on Should I believe what the SIAI claims? - Less Wrong
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I'm pretty sure that a gray goo nanotech disaster is generally not considered plausible-- if nothing else, it would generate so much heat the nanotech would fail.
This doesn't address less dramatic nanotech disasters-- say, a uFAI engineering viruses to wipe out the human race so that it can build what it wants without the risk of interference.
This argument can't be valid, because it also implies that biological life can't work either. At best, this implies a limit on the growth rate; but without doing the math, there is no particular reason to think that limit is slow.
Grey goo is assumed to be a really fast replicator that will eat anything. Arguably, it's a movie plot disaster.
From that thread, it seems that many people like to speculate on possible disasters.
The point is that they know they're doing it for the fun of it rather than actually coming up with anything that needs to be prevented.
Eric Drexler decided it was implausible some time ago:
"Nanotech guru turns back on 'goo'"
However, some still flirt with the corresponding machine intelligence scenarios - though those don't seem much more likely to me.
Google "global ecophagy".
I've done so. What's your take on the odds of the biosphere being badly deteriorated?
Robert Freitas seemed to be trying to argue that it would be difficult, and he couldn't argue it very well - for example, he used Eric Drexler's assumptions that were conservative for Nanosystems and anticonservative for grey goo, about a single radiation strike being enough to make a nanosystem fail, in calculating the amount of shielding required for aerovores that were mostly shielding (if I recall my reactions upon reading correctly). And despite that, the best he could come up with was "the heat bloom would be detected and stopped by our police systems", like they couldn't spread through the jet stream first and go into their final reproductive phase later, etcetera.
Unless Freitas is missing something that he seemed heavily motivated to find, I have to conclude that turning the biosphere into grey goop does not seem to be very difficult given what we currently know of the rules.
What's an easy way to cause a global ecophagy?